Evocation Magic And its Spell Focus.

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Bunnysmack
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Re: Evocation Magic And its Spell Focus.

Post by Bunnysmack » Thu Jan 14, 2021 8:05 pm

You took the opposite meaning from what I intended. My point was that, on Arelith, sorcerers are significantly more useful and stronger than non-wild mage wizards and always have been. You see the same dichotomy with favored souls and clerics; the sole thing that keeps clerics viable over FS right now are death domain harm, protection domain, healer path, and the extremely rare charisma battle cleric. Otherwise, favored soul does everything you want a cleric to do but better.
Ah, apologies. I didn't mean to misrepresent what you were trying to say. I think that when comparing FvS to Battle cleric, that assessment is true, but in terms of spell casting, Healer keeps pace well with their extended applications of heal spell spontaneous casting. On the other hand, if not for the extra skill points and feats, non-wild mage wizard would be actively inferior to Sorcerer. Even wild mage would be somewhat weak in comparison, outside of their one use of -fate per day (which, yes, is a VERY powerful ability).
There are many situations in which even non wild mage wizards are better than sorcerers. People who made both sorcerers and wizards know how much you have to give up in order to play sorcerer. If you go heavy AC that means you go both paly/bg and a tumble dip class, which means your CL will take a huge blow as well as forcing you to invest in still spell. You will maybe have 1 metamagic. It will also greatly hurt the AB/AC of your summons.
If you go DC sorcerer you won't have the variety in spell foci. You will have two, maybe three if you're feeling brave giving up everything else and being a DC mage it's really important to be able to transition between abjuration/enchantment/illusion/evo for crowd control.
And the skills, it's such a huge pain to choose which ones to invest. Being both skill and feat starved is not fun.
Sorcerers shine in 1v1, 2v2 maybe. Where they can spam IGMS and can reliably counter spell. Outside of that wizards not only get better but also are much more fun to play. It's no coincidence that in the last player count there were 121 wizards + 61 wild mages and only 51 sorcerers + 73 true flamers.
If it wasn't for divine dips, I'd have more sympathy for the plight of sorcerer, but considering they are almost always used in sorc builds I've seen on Arelith, the prevailing meta of "my saves only ever fail on a 1!" makes me less than concerned about the place of sorcerers in the server. It's a meta that's pretty frustrating from the stand point of most casters that have to deal with it. Yes, there are strategies to compensate for it, and yes, I use them, but it's still annoying.

To tie back to the main thread here about Evocation, that's actually why I like evocation so much. It has a fair amount of workaround solutions for the increasingly high volume of PCs that have universal spell saves at 38+.
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Ninjimmy
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Re: Evocation Magic And its Spell Focus.

Post by Ninjimmy » Fri Jan 15, 2021 8:39 am

Hunter548 wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 5:48 pm
Ninjimmy wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 8:48 am
... Guys, the point of them being there is to reflect a character developing their speciality.

You get the cookie because you ate your vegetables by taking spell focus feats like a good caster.
Not much of a specialty when every wizard can get half of the -commands without any real sacrifice, and almost every sorcerer can get a full third of them as well.

You can keep a reflection of specialization by making the DCs or CLs of the new system relevant, as well.
IDK what new system you're proposing exactly so can't poke holes in the second bit, but I'm baffled at "without any real sacrifice" and "it'd open up design space as far as adding feats and classes to take as a mage", they seem contradictory?

I mean, the design intention (I would think) was that taking a series of spell focus feats gave you a reward beyond DC boosts as the feats are kind of mandatory. The -commands are a reward for something that feels like a pre-requisite and is reflective of a PC's skill with that school. The fact you can collect quite a few -commands but not all of them is how you get characters who specialise in one thing but not all.

That said, I'm not really clear how you intend your new system to work beyond what I've inferred, making the IG examples of spell-school mastery regular spells, which'll mean scrolls and every LM having access to every command (theoretically, presuming a few of these are classed as 9th level) and all the fiddly issues that'd come from it being available to every class with enough lore.

I'm still firmly Camp "Spell Focus Cookie" but could stand to have a better idea what you're proposing.
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